LatinOcean - Marketing and Web Technologies Applied to Talent Management

Brett’s put on a post today re. an unnamed aggregator/job ads scraper that forces people to register before looking for jobs; I haven’t come across the service myself so I am taking his word for it. I think his underline comment is that this behavior is kind of parasite-like as it gathers registrations from traffic sourced from third party content (job boards, corporate sites).

This got a rant on aggregation going

Early in the life of the public internet, common wisdom flagged it as a disruptive force as it enabled disintermediation on a large scale. soon enough though, some online services also proved to be additional but effective/smarter intermediators (e.g. price comparison) to the shopper/surfer/applicant.

Given that, job ads aggregation can provide value as it intermediates/consolidates information into one environment (e.g. all jobs from all sites) IF there are no additional/offsetiing costs to bear. such costs can be:

a) loss or relevancy in results if the search/filtering technology that must accompany increased volumes

b) loss of content (e.g. maybe a job board has a great advice section)

c) other barriers, such as forced registrations with no additional service or feature

I am sure there are some other cost elements needed to make this list more comprehensive

In any case, I am qualifying c) because if the aggregator tells me as a job hunter that they need my registration to personalise my search results, imbed results feedback to enhance relevance, trawl for job seeker advice based on my career stage, feature employers with employment branding initiaves, etc. AND they actually deliver on these promises. then I might just want in.

I am not making a judgement on the legality/ethics of the scraping or how registrations are procured. I go to the viability of a niche service that is not being properly covered yet in this region. Strictly speaking, if all an aggregator has to offer is more volume, then that business model might be doomed; additional onerous tasks (costs) such as registrations with no exchange of value would only make the death more sudden.

Then again, you knew all that

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 5th, 2006 at 5:57 pm and is filed under Search, Sourcing, Talent. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.